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Unions Consider Charter Schools of Their Own

In the last five years, as more states and parents have embraced the movement to create charter schools, national teachers' unions have often resisted, worrying about how to hold onto the kind of teachers' benefits that some proponents of school choice say limit a charter school's success.

Now, as 25 states have passed legislation to allow schools that are publicly financed yet independently run, the National Education Association is taking another tack: encouraging its chapters to start their own such schools. On a smaller scale, the American Federation of Teachers is making similar efforts.

Last year the association began a million-dollar program intended to help its teachers set up schools in a half-dozen states. The leaders of the union, which has 2.2 million members, say they want to study how charter schools can work in a union setting and to pass those lessons along to teachers.

The first N.E.A.-sponsored school opened this month in Lanikai, Hawaii. Others are being developed in San Diego, Phoenix, Colorado Springs, East Point, Ga., which is near Atlanta, and now Connecticut, which is among the latest states to pass charter-school legislation.

The union requires that the schools it helps be similar to regular schools in their financing, teacher-pupil ratios and percentage of students with special needs so that schools elsewhere will not be concerned that the program would be too expensive as they decide whether to try the same strategy. ''We want this to be replicable,'' said Mark W. Knapp, president of the association's San Diego chapter.

The national union will not provide its schools with cash, but it will provide experts to help teachers with administrative tasks, like budgeting and personnel procedures, and with instructional issues, like developing curriculums and deciding how to assess student performance, said Robert M. McClure, co-director of the union's charter program.

Such help is one of the reasons why a group of teachers and parents at Buckingham Elementary School in Norwich, Conn., a mill town of about 37,000 people, are hoping to become a charter school that the union adopts.

Joan E. Heffernan teaches one of the three ''integrated day'' classes started at Buckingham eight years ago to emphasize independent research projects by students rather than traditional teaching.

Ms. Heffernan's classroom even looks different. On a recent visit, several fifth and sixth graders were painting at a jumble of tables, an adult volunteer on a couch was helping someone with a lesson, and three students had dumped the contents of a geography game onto a rug.

If the classes were incorporated into a charter school, she said, the teachers would like to extend the school day by two hours, an hour on either side.

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The statewide union in Connecticut hopes to choose its N.E.A. school before Dec. 2, the state's deadline for charter school applications.

N.E.A. leaders say the 2.2 million-member teachers' national union wants to study how charter schools work, encourage innovation and pass those lessons along to teachers throughout the country.

By helping to develop charter schools, the association hopes to prove that union contracts do not hinder quality education, Mr. Knapp of San Diego said. ''We believe it's district regulations and state regulations,'' he said. ''We believe the hindrance is on the other side.''

But Chester E. Finn Jr., who co-wrote a report on charter schools for the conservative Hudson Institute, said that the union's schools, constrained by collective bargaining and certification requirements, would be pale imitations of other charter schools. ''The single most important form of freedom for charter schools is to hire and fire employees as they like and pay them as they see fit,'' Mr. Finn said.

The American Federation of Teachers, with 900,000 members, has also been helping chapters begin charter schools. It is also providing guidance, not financing.

The first charter school sponsored by the federation opened this month in Houston; the group is also working with the teachers' union in Newark to develop a school-to-work vocational high school, said Joan A. Buckley, the union's associate director for education issues.

It is hard to say how the union charter schools will differ from the more than 260 other charter schools in the country that are run by private companies. In Colorado Springs, for example, the charter school will have a principal who teaches.

Several of the National Education Association's schools are focused on solving particular educational problems. In Phoenix, where the dropout rate for ninth grade is often as high as 20 percent, teachers are developing a school for seventh, eighth and ninth graders that is intended to help students make the transition to high school, said Peggy Story, the charter school facilitator for the Arizona Education Association.